Moments of delight
You know what I mean: that moment that creates a happy reaction, where your face lights up, a moment you want to share.
We are so functional in the products and services we create (and use) that we forget to include the touches that make something ‘delightful’. Who cares about ‘delightful’ in a product or service? I do and so do most other people — but they won’t tell you that if you ask them. Instead, we make do, focussing on what we need a product to do.
As designers and developers, we are all responsible for creating elements of engaging experiences, so, what I call moments of delight are the unexpected easter eggs that appear in an interface, on the street, in passing, that you stumble upon and want to share.
The little touches that mean a customer can’t help but smile
Citymapper is a great examples of this. Take an otherwise functional app, about getting around town and alongside the bus route, the train route and the walking route, all of which will take you some time, how about the Teleporter route?
Or, forget interfaces for a second, how many potholes do you trip over or walk around? If the holes were filled with beautiful things, would you stop and look, smirk and then take someone back to that spot to also share in that moment? Steve Wheen, the Pothol Gardener enables exactly that with his immaculately crafted scenes for otherwise ugly moments.
We talk alot in product development about the Minimum Viable Product. Instead, if we bake these moments of delight into our products and services from the get go, we get to the point of launching with what one of my product managers at MOO (Ali Cohen) aptly named the Minimum Loveable Product. In my opinion, a minimum loveable product will be forgiven more for any issues in early releases than a minimum viable product.
Minimum Loveable Product
[the thing that people will tell stories about]
vs
Minimum Viable Product
[the most viable thing you can release in order to test]
We have to get to a point where our views about what we subject customers to is driven by more than just functionality — instead, drive it by delight and see how that transforms (and trumps) function, especially if we want to create frictionless experiences across channels.
